A Nationally Recognized Top 100 Heart Hospital

Carle Foundation Hospital is one of the nation's Top 100 Cardiovascular Hospitals, as ranked by Evanston,IL-based Solucient®. The annual Solucient award objectively measures performance on key criteria at the nation’s top performing heart hospitals.

This is the second time Carle Foundation Hospital has been recognized with this honor and is one of only eight Illinois hospitals to have earned this honor in 2005.

The 2005 Solucient 100 Top Hospitals®: Cardiovascular Benchmarks for Success study will appear in an upcoming edition of Modern Healthcare magazine. Solucient provides comprehensive health care information to drive business growth, manage costs, and help deliver quality care for providers, payers, employers, and pharmaceutical companies.

The data sets used for this study represent more than 6,000 U.S. hospitals and more than 12 million patient discharges.

• States with higher rates of revascularization (angioplasty and bypass surgery) for treatment of the most severe form of heart attacks are experiencing higher survival rates, with great variation by state in revascularization rates for these kinds of heart attacks.
• Survival rates for patients with this type of heart attack are equally good whether they are directly admitted for revascularization or are stable enough to be transferred to another facility providing the procedures.
• Winners of the 100 Top Hospitals Cardiovascular award were more likely than peer hospitals to provide revascularization to patients with the most severe heart attacks.
• One kind of post-operative complication for all revascularized patients — post-operative hemorrhage or hematoma — is rapidly declining while another — post-operative sepsis — seems to be increasing.
• If cardiovascular services in all acute-care hospitals performed at the same level as the hospitals with the nation's top cardiovascular services, 10,000 additional cardiovascular patients could survive each year; and an additional 1,100 patients could be complication-free.
• Winning hospitals are 23 percent less likely than non-winners to have post-operative infections and about 20 percent less likely than non-winners to have post-operative hemorrhage for patients undergoing coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) or percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI).
• Winning hospitals annually perform as much as 80 percent more bypass surgeries and PCIs, including angioplasties, as their peers.
• Cardiovascular patients at winning hospitals return to everyday life faster than those at non-winning hospitals. Patients at the winning hospitals were released more than a half-day earlier than patients at peer hospitals.
• Average cardiovascular-related costs for benchmark hospitals were nearly 15 percent lower than at peer hospitals.

The seventh edition of the Solucient 100 Top Hospitals®: Cardiovascular Benchmarks for Success study analyzed acute care hospitals nationwide using detailed empirical performance data, including publicly available Medicare MEDPAR data and Medicare cost reports. The measures were calculated for three classes of hospitals with the following number of winners in each:

• Teaching with Cardiovascular Residency Programs - 30 winners
• Teaching without Cardiovascular Residency Programs - 40 winners (This is the category in which Carle Foundation Hospital is included.)
• Community - 30 winners

The study scored facilities according to key measures: risk-adjusted medical mortality, risk-adjusted surgical mortality, complications, percentage of CABG patients with internal mammary artery use, procedure volume, severity-adjusted average length of stay, and wage and severity-adjusted average cost.

Cardiac services at Carle Foundation Hospital include:

• Open heart and beating heart surgeries
• Five cardiac cath labs, with one dedicated to electrophysiology studies
• The only electrophysiology clinic in the region
• The use of new drug-eluting stents
• Availability the ventricular assist device or partial artificial heart
• The TMR Heart Laserä
• A comprehensive echocardiography service
• Surgeons at Carle perform more open-heart surgeries, catheterizations and angioplasty procedures than any other hospital in east central Illinois.
• Learn more about the Carle Heart Center

More information on this study and other 100 Top Hospitals research is available at www.100tophospitals.com.